Every category has a version of the same sentence. The fastest. The most secure. The most loved. The only platform you need. The team that cares more.
These claims share a structure: they ask the buyer to compare. They assume a buyer who is already engaged, already interested, already willing to do the work of evaluating several options on somebody else’s terms.
Most buyers are not doing that work. They are trying to get through a Tuesday. “We’re better” is not a message. It is a request for homework.
Why “better” fails
It is unfalsifiable. Better at what, for whom, compared to which alternative? Without those answers, the claim is a feeling the company has about itself.
It is unmemorable. Every competitor is saying it, so none of them is saying anything. A claim everyone makes is not a claim; it is background noise.
It is unhelpful. It gives the buyer a conclusion without a reason. And a conclusion without a reason is exactly what the buyer cannot repeat to their partner, their boss or their board.
The buyer’s question is rarely “who is best?” It is “what is this, and is it for me, right now?”
Positioning is context, not adjectives
April Dunford’s definition is the most practical I know: positioning is the context you set for a product, so that the right customer understands what it is, why it matters, and why it is better than the alternatives — in the way that customer measures “better”.
Notice how much work that sentence does. It requires you to name the market you are actually in, the alternatives the buyer is actually considering, the attributes that actually matter, and the proof that you actually have them. It is a chain of specifics, not a slogan.
Most weak positioning skips the first two steps. It assumes the category is obvious and the alternatives are the ones the company worries about. But the buyer’s real alternative is often not a competitor at all. It is a spreadsheet, a workaround, an intern, or doing nothing.
Three moves that help
Name the alternative. Including “do nothing”. If you cannot say what the buyer would do without you, you do not yet know what you are selling against.
Name the change. Not the feature — the change in the buyer’s situation. What can they now do, avoid, become or stop worrying about? A position is a before-and-after, compressed.
Make the difference legible. One sentence a customer could repeat. Not a paragraph a strategist could admire.
An example
Suppose two project tools. One says: “Beautifully designed project management for modern teams.” The other says: “The project tool your clients will actually open.”
The first is a set of adjectives. The second is a position. It names a market (client-facing work), an alternative (tools clients ignore), a change (clients participate), and a measurable difference (open rates, maybe). It also implies a trade-off: it may be less good for internal-only teams. That is a feature of a real position. It excludes someone.
This is the part companies find hardest. A position that includes everyone is not a position. It is a hope.
The “so what” ladder
State your differentiator. Ask “so what?” Answer it. Ask again. Stop when you reach a consequence the buyer already cares about. That consequence belongs in the headline; the differentiator belongs in the proof.
Two warnings
First, differentiation must be true. A distinctive claim that the product cannot support is not positioning; it is a debt. The market will collect.
Second, relevance is not optional. Being different in a way nobody values is just being strange. The useful test is not “are we unique?” but “is our difference a reason for this person to choose us, in this situation?”
“Better” is not a strategy because it outsources the argument to the buyer. A real position does the opposite. It takes responsibility for making the choice easy — and for making the reason memorable enough to survive the trip home.